Seems Like Only Yesterday
by Nala's Mom
Summary: VERY AU due to HBP. Editing in progress. Sorry. A stag and a cat make an astounding discovery: They're humans! Humans who have been dead, as in as a doornail, for nearly fifteen years! ships: LJ for now
1. Stags Eat Grass

Disclaimer:_ Is it just me? Or does this seem wholly unnecessary at this point? Oh well, (sigh) anything that exists in a series of books titled Harry Potter and the... is not mine! They, and anything contained therein, belong to J.K. Rowing, her contracted publishers, etc. Anything you do not recognize is mine, but I'm not making any money. This is strictly for the fun of it. Judging by the evidence, I don't think Jo minds us doing this that much, so please don't sue me! It would be a giant waste of your valuable time!_

Summary: _(Majorly!)_ _Alternate Universe (AU) A stag and a cat make the astounding discovery that they are humans who have been dead, as in as a doornail, for nearly fifteen years! Set in 6th year._

Genre: _Romance/ Spiritual_

Rating: _PG to T (In other words, somewhere in the middle.)_

Spoilers: _Even though I started writing this fic before Half-Blood Prince came out, some of what's in here could be considered spoilers for the said book. It's all stuff at which I was guessing, was going to put in anyway, will merely be changing a few of the details so they match Jo's account, and keeping a few of the details as I have them so they don't. _

(Edit: A/N: _Now that Book Six is out, this fic is so incredibly AU that some of you might think that I won't be finishing it. That would be where you are wrong. I have no intension of dropping this fic nor skipping strait to the last chapter just so I can have a happy ending. (Such is an option that some have used to great effect, but that I simply don't have the heart to do.) I am continuing this story to the bitter end whether or not anyone reads and reviews. It's more for my benefit anyway.)_

A/N:_ This is another one of those Lily-and-James-aren't-really-dead fics. I know, I know, over-used plot line. But maybe (just maybe) I've managed to do it just differently enough that it won't be too boring. Besides, if you're like me and actually _enjoy_ this kind of thing… If you _don't_ like this kind of thing, don't read it. But if you do read it, and think I followed the cliches, or went way out of character, or my spelling and grammar are atrocious, or any number of other **really big** fan-fic no-no's, _or_ if you wish to congratulate me on avoiding any of these traps, I would be more than happy to receive a revue or two. In other words, constructive criticism is welcome; _**flames are not**

_By the way, this is actually my first fic ever. I'm working on a Marauder fic, but it's still in the pre-outline,-brainstorming,-nothing-makes-any-sense,-you-don't-want-to-know-how-bad stage. (Edit: This fic has transformed into what can now be read as "I'll Be Seeing You," which is a Sirius Black/ original character romance and an indeterminate number of flashbacks featured in both fics that will have Marauder elements in them.) It'll come around eventually. (Edit: Quite recently.) But in the mean time… maybe I can use some of the criticism from this one to improve the final result. _

_Other Note-Worthy Material:_

_Well known or widely excepted facts about the deaths of Lily and James Potter (In other words, things my story does NOT contradict)…_

_Fact 1: Lily and James **both **died by way of the killing curse, Avada Kedavra, on the night of October 31, 1981._

_Fact 2: Said curses originated from the wand of "Lord" Voldemort, and most likely were cast by him as well._

_Fact 3: Lily's death was not necessary, and therefore, it resulted in forming a protective shield for baby Harry that caused the curse, when aimed at Harry, to rebound upon Voldemort and "kill" him._

_Fact 4: James and Lily's bodies were still there when Sirius came by "on that flyin' motorbike 'e used ta ride" and had his talk with Hagrid._

_Things we don't know for sure one way or the other that will be discussed in this fic:_

_Question 1: How does the killing curse work? You know, logistically._

_Question 2: How dead did Lily need to be to save Harry?_

_Question 3: How does the animagus transformation work?_

_Question 4: Where is Godric's Hollow?_

_Some other things to note: If it's in Italics, it's thoughts. If it's in quotes, it's the exact words used by the character, thoughts or not. If it's in Italics before the title of the chapter, it's me. And. Oh yeah! If it's me, it's written as though I were speaking, so grammar doesn't count (as much). (Edit: If it's me and it's in parenthesis and marked edit, it was written during or after the writing of chapter 12.)_

_And now without further ado…

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_

Seems Like Only Yesterday

**Chapter 1** In Which a Stag Wonders Why He's Eating Grass

On the edge of a deserted moor, in a thickly wooded forest, teeming with life but with a calm serenity, a stag with a magnificent rack of antlers stood in majestic silence. He eyed his surroundings anxiously, ears cocked, listening for the slightest noise that could indicate the approach of danger. Sensing nothing, he slowly made his way out of the shelter of the trees.

He might not normally have taken such a risk, if it were not for the call that the lush green grass, now not more than five feet away, provided. Cautiously, he stepped out to where he could reach the nourishing vegetation. Now completely exposed, if there had been any hunters around, he wouldn't have lasted very long. It was lucky for him, that this particular patch of forest was strictly guarded against such intrusion. Not that it didn't have its dangers, however.

Slowly, the stag lowered his head and opened his mouth to…"_Why am I eating grass?" _he wondered to himself. He suddenly felt very odd, standing there on all four limbs, putting forth so much effort in the hope of filling his stomach with the earthy blades. The feeling _so_ unnerved his already weary brain that he bolted back into the forest.

"_What am I running from?"_ He demanded of himself, _"What am I so scared of?… Where am I _going_?" _He stopped running and took in his soundings: trees, rocks, dirt… a forest. _Forest?_ _"That's not right."_ he told himself, bewildered, _"I shouldn't be in a forest."_ But for the life of him, he couldn't remember where he was supposed to be. _"What's going on? Am I suffering from amnesia? Do people suffering from amnesia wonder if they're suffering from amnesia?"_

The whole situation was thoroughly confusing him. _"And why do I have hooves?" _Suddenly, an image came flooding back to him, an image of himself transforming into a stag. _Himself? Was it himself? It certainly didn't look much like he did now. _And then he remembered. _"Animagi!"_ he told himself, _"I'm a human who can transform into a stag at will!"_ And with that, James Potter was standing where the stag had once been.

"That!" James told himself aloud, "Was definitely odd." He looked down at his now fully human body, silently thanking the powers that be that the animagus transformation included clothes. "Now what?" he asked no one in particular. "Ok," he said, trying to make his frazzled mind think clearly. "If I'm a human, I must have a name; I'll start there." He thought for a moment before coming up with an answer. He felt the need to say it out loud, as though it would make it easier to remember that way. "My name is James Potter. I live at…"

He couldn't even remember his own address! He muttered a mild expletive before he remembered that he wasn't supposed to use words like that in front of the baby. _Baby? Harry! His son, Harry! _"Where is he? What happened to him? Who's his mum?" The last question at least was easy enough to answer. Even as he said it, an image of an auburn-haired beauty with emerald eyes danced into his mind. "Lily," he whispered as he collapsed on to his knees. "Where are you?" But more importantly, "Where am I? Why am I out here, instead of with you… and our son?"

_What madness had driven him to abandon his wife and son? For surely it was madness that had done it! He could _**never**_ have done it willingly! Never!_ Even now, as he knelt on a bed of crushed and trampled leaves, he felt a kind of madness pulling at him. _He'd spent far too long as a stag_, he realized. _It was long enough to have completely forgotten who he was… who his family was._ **"NO!"** He shouted into the trees, jumping to his feet, causing a flock of sparrows to vacate the tree nearest him. "No," he muttered, almost as a plea. _He had to find them. He had to know what happened to them. Even if the truth was terrible, he had to know_.

_But where to look? Merlin! He didn't even know where to start! _Desperately, he racked his brain, searching for anything that would help him locate his family. _"What's the last thing I remember doing as a human?" _But that was just the point, he couldn't remember _doing_ anything as a human. He couldn't remember much of what he had done as a stag either. His conscious memory seemed to start when he had decided he wanted grass from the meadow for breakfast that morning. His stomach growled, but he had more important things on his mind. "Obviously, I have memories from my life before. I just can't seem to access them." He was speaking aloud again, trying to force his thoughts to make sense. "I have to go home, but where is home?" He started pacing between the trees as he fought to focus his thoughts.

Lily's face kept swimming into view. Not that he minded thinking about her, but the longer he thought of her, the longer it would take to remember how to find her. He was caught in a whirl of memories of sensations and feelings long forgotten: the sight of her eyes, the sound of her laugh, the smell of her hair, the taste of her kiss… the feel of running his hands through her silky waves of hair and all the way down her back to their tips… the warmth of her body as he held her close…

Simply remembering these things was enough to make his whole body ache to be with her. He loved her. He knew he loved her. "So, why did I leave her?" he shouted to the open sky. No answer came. "Or did she leave me?" But in his heart, he knew that wasn't right, even as he said it. _There must be a reason, some inexplicable reason_. Then an answer came, but not an answer to his question, more somewhere he could go to find that answer. "Godric's Hollow," he said, "Home! Or the name of the village at least." He screwed up his face in concentration, once again bullying his brain into remembering. He could see it, a small two-story cottage. _"But how do I get there?"_ and it came. "Apparate," he said, and he did.


	2. Cats Eat Fish Heads

Disclaimer_ (see chapter one)_

A/N _One thing before we get going here... This is where the story starts to take a spiritual turn, so don't say I didn't warn you._

**Chapter 2 **In Which a Cat Recalls that It Is NOT Proper for a Lady to be Eating Decomposing Fish Heads That Came Out of Someone Else's Dumpster.

In a dark alleyway off a bustling and over-crowded street in the heart of downtown London, a cat with brilliant green eyes and long fur rummaged through a restaurant dumpster. At one point, her fur had been silky smooth and pure white except for the very tips of her ears, which had always been black, but years living on the street had changed that.

The restaurant owner didn't approve of having stray cats digging through his garbage, scattering trash all over the alley and fighting over scraps. It hadn't occurred to him that if he merely left them to it, the number of fights would drop, and the contents of the cans were only scattered when he interrupted them. This particular feline held no qualms about disregarding absolutely everything that he saw fit to yell at her as she continued searching for something that would ease her aching stomach. Anything would do, but she was particularly found of fish. That was why she had been drawn to this particular restaurant. All-you-can-eat fried fish for the customers meant all-you-can-eat fish-bones, and other scraps that humans couldn't stomach, for the local cat population.

After only a few seconds of having to endure the owner's ranting, the cat found what she had been looking for, and, picking it up between her teeth, she leaped jauntily from the dumpster. She dodged the empty tin he had lobbed at her, and, tail held high twitching nonchalantly, she walked toward the far end of the alley. Once there, she hopped gracefully on to the dividing wall and there perched herself to consume her meal.

Several satisfying minutes later, she remained sitting on the wall in a state of utter contentment. _"That was the most _discussing_ thing I've ever done in my life."_ This realization dislodged her from her lofty perch with great effectiveness. Leaping into the air, she landed on the grungy cobblestones, which made up the pavement of the alley, in a heap. Dazed from her sudden return to ground level, she looked up at where she had once been, confused, but quickly recovered and went on her merry way.

Later, as she sat on a street corner, licking her paws clean, without a care in the world, she found herself, once again, in utter consternation, _"Soap and water would make this_ so_ much easier." _In a panic, she dropped back to all fours and skidded into an alley. In a split second, she was at the far end, cowering behind another dumpster. Her heart pounded against her rib cage for a full minute while she considered what had just happened. _She had just run away... from a thought. _The consequences of this were truly disheartening. _If thoughts were frightening to her, that meant that she hadn't been thinking for a very long time. _Vaguely, she wondered just how long it had been.

"_If I haven't been thinking, what exactly have I _been_ doing?" _She remembered the incident on the wall earlier, and gave an involuntary shudder. _"That's definitely NOT proper behavior for a lady… When have _you_ ever cared about proper behavior, Lily? That's your sister talking." Lady? Lily? Sister? "Where did all that come from?" _All were new, strange terms to her. _But if she had used them, she must now their meaning._ She pondered this for a while before coming to a conclusion. _Lady meant she was human, Lily was her name, and sister…_ Again she thought, gently lifting the memories out of her subconscious mind. _She had a sister named Petunia, who was _obsessed_ about the proper way of doing things_. _"But if I'm human,"_ she found herself wondering, _"Why do I have fur?"_ Then, slowly, a memory crept into her minds-eye, washing over her, as though in answer to her question.

She was in a brightly decorated room, standing next to a crib, holding a frightened, balling baby in her arms, and trying desperately to comfort him when she was terrified herself. Then, she saw it through the window, a flash of bright green light in the direction of the living room, and heard the shattering of glass. _"James is dead!"_ She remembered thinking. Not knowing what she was going to do, she set her baby down in his crib and ran from the room. Anything she might try would require her wand, and she had stupidly left it sitting on her bedside table when she had gone downstairs to tell James to come to bed. Now, he was dead. _Peter had betrayed them after all!_

Her husband's murderer saw her closing the master bedroom door from the top of the stairs, and laughed his high, cold, cruel laugh. He came through the door just as she rounded the corner of her bed to get her wand.

"You cannot save him now, woman," he told her, with a hint of jest in his inhuman voice. _He thought she had come in here to get the baby! Well, she certainly wasn't going to try to correct him._

"Not Harry! Not Harry! Please, I'll do anything!" she wailed. And she _would_ have.

"Stand aside, you foolish girl! Stand aside, now!" he ordered her, but she wasn't really listening. _If she didn't step aside, he would kill her, and after he killed her, he'd kill Harry. But if she died to save her son's life…_

"No, not Harry! Take me, kill me instead!" she begged. But as she did, she thought, _"If I try to go for my wand, he'll kill me for it, and it won't have been for protecting Harry. But I can't just stand here and do nothing! He'd never expect me to leap at him and attack him, but I have no weapon. I'm no match for him like this."_ So she didn't leap on him as she was, she leapt on him as a cat. Or she tried, she was only half-way through the transformation when the curse struck her.

"_Then, I should be dead," _Lily Potter thought, when she realized she'd reached the end of the memory. _"I should be dead and buried, six feet under!…Next to James." _Grief flooded through her. _Why wasn't she dead enjoying the bliss of paradise with him? She'd heard of out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences, but this was ridiculous! _She wanted to cry, but then realized that, as a cat, that was physically impossible. _"Am I able to be a human again? Or has my disruption of the natural order of things left me stranded in this body forever?"_ She felt that it would probably be a fitting punishment, but there was only one way to find out.

There was a loud scraping noise, as the dumpster was pushed away from the wall of the alley by her suddenly expanded body. She then found herself tightly pinned into her hiding place. "Great!" she said, with just a hint of sarcasm. "Ok," she said, a little breathless because of the intense amount of pressure on her diaphragm, "I can either retransform and find some other secluded corner to transform back in." Considering her fear that she was going to be trapped, that was not an entertaining prospect. "Or I can try to wiggle free of this… thing." She hadn't said the word, but she had thought it. And as she made a fruitless attempt at her second option, she mentally chastised herself for it. "Or," she continued through clenched teeth as she fought to make her words a reality, "I can try…rrr… to…umph… get this… arrr… thing… ugh… off of meeee…"

With a terrible echoing screech and a sigh to expel her frustration, the giant trash can gave way to Lily's efforts, "Rahh!" She took a few deep breaths to calm herself, and then said, "Jiminy Cricket! What are they throwing away in there **_BRICKS?_"** Now that the crisis was averted, she was free to grieve in peace.

She felt her knees hit the ground, as they buckled under her. They'd bruise later, but she really didn't care. She needed to be on her knees right now. The pain of loss tore at her, as she folded her arms across her stomach, bowed her head, closed her eyes, and turned to the one source of help Who was there no matter what. She poured out her soul to Him, with everything she had. Later, she wouldn't be able to recall the words she used, just the feeling, which had come over her by the time she had finished. It was peace. Somehow, though she'd never be able to explain it, she knew that everything was as it should be, and that was enough.

She stood. _The first thing she needed to do would be to find out what day it was. That would be easy if she could find a newspaper._ She knew the date of the day she… the last day she could remember. She walked out of the alley, and stood in the sunlight for a bit, feeling the warmth on her face. _"It's summer." _She started walking down the street at a brisk pace, when she made this realization; it had been October when she… That meant it had been, at the very least, nine months since then. Panic was starting to get the better of her again.

After a bit, she realized that passers-by were staring at her. _"I must look a fright,"_ she thought, _"It makes sense; living as a common stray cat for… who knows how long." _She stopped to stare at her reflection in a store window, before crossing a side street. She was right. She was filthy, from her grungy, tangled hair to her stained and tattered clothes. _Oh no! Her clothes! She was wearing a nightdress! No wonder people were staring!_ She decided to proceed on her quest for a paper with added vigor.

Coming upon the next street corner, she stopped and crouched in front of a mechanized newspaper stand to read the date at the top. For the second time that day, she dropped to her knees. This time it was from shock. The stand ratted noisily, as she allowed her forehead to bang into the door. The date reverberated over and over in her mind, July 31, 1996. _She had been living as a cat for nearly fifteen years. "It's Harry's birthday," _she thought, but then added, _"If he's still alive… No,"_ she told herself firmly, _"Don't think about that, yet. There will be plenty of time for it when you get to the house."_ And with that, she stood up, marched strait into the nearest alleyway, ducked behind a dumpster, and disapparated.

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A/N_ If the quotes of Lily and Voldemort from PoA are off, _PLEASE_ tell me what was wrong, so I can fix it. I don't have a copy with me ( ,( ) to use as reference, so I had to do it from memory. Hope you like it anyway._


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